Dead But Not Forgotten Read Online Free PDF

and maybe he’d actually passed out again. Hard to tell under that mess of stringy hair.
    Kevin exchanged a look with Kenya—silent partner communication, the kind of calculations and responses they did in crisis situations when there wasn’t time or strategic space to talk out loud.
Go?
he asked her, with a quirk of his eyebrows. He read the shift of her weight to her forward foot.
Stay.
    Well, crap.
    Before he could start trying to negotiate their staying alive, the situation changed for all of them, because Quentin Glick wasn’t unconscious after all.
    It ought to have been impossible for anyone to snap those cuffs at that angle, but a single roll of Glick’s shoulders and his hands were loose. Glick must have broken his own bones to pull his hands free of the restraints. Before Kevin could process that fact, the man was up, all teeth and crazy eyes and blood leaking down his face, and it was pretty clear that the sheriff of Area Six had decided that maybe the easiest way to handle this was to let Glick go mad-dog on them and then clear up the mess once it was over. The vampires were fast enough to have intervened, but none of them moved a muscle.
    Kevin had one chance, and he took it, slamming his forehead hard into the man’s nose. It slowed Glick down, at least, and Kevin backed out of the way, grabbing up his old friend the champagne bottle.
    Glick whirled. A human couldn’t move that fast,
shouldn’t
, but he did, and before Kenya could finish snapping out her riot baton again, he had her clutched in both hands, one at her throat, one on the side of her head. Perfect leverage to snap her neck. Sickeningly, the broken bones in his hands were sticking out, one breaking the skin in a red-filmed white spear, but the pain wasn’t stopping him.
    Kenya went very still. Kevin came to a halt, bottle trembling in his hand and ice forming around his fast-beating heart.
No. No, no, no . . .
He carefully set the bottle down and spread his empty hands. “Let her go,” he said. “Please.”
    â€œDon’t you beg,” Kenya said. “Don’t do it, Kevin.”
    Glick snarled. If there was anything human left in him, anything rational, it was buried too deep to reach. Kevin felt a surge of rage and hopelessness, because there was nothing he could do,
nothing
; Kenya was going to die and he was going to have to watch it happen and he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.
    Glick began backing away, dragging Kevin’s partner with him. She was letting her weight sag, hoping to pull him off balance, but whatever was fueling him was letting him pull her along like she was a rag doll.
    Kevin followed, keeping the distance constant between them. The vampires moved out of Glick’s way as he backed toward the door.
    â€œOpen it,” Stan Davis said. One of the vampires entered a code on the keypad next to the exit and hit the metal panic bar, and it sagged open to the night and a deserted parking lot; the patrons must have taken the hint to get
way
the hell out of Dodge. No sign of police, either.
    Glick backed away through the door, grinning at Kevin through bloody teeth. It wasn’t imagination; his eyes weren’t just bloodshot, they were bloody.
Bleeding.
He was crying blood. He was hemorrhaging from his ears, too.
    â€œMy advice is to let him go,” Davis said from behind them. None of the vampires had moved again, and Davis’s tone seemed calm and disinterested. “Don’t throw your life away, Mr. Pryor. She is a lost cause.”
    Fuck you,
Kevin thought furiously. He hardly ever cursed, not out loud, but he wanted to yell it loud and rip the vampire’s head off in that moment. Nice idea. Impossible, but nice.
    He took another step as Glick dragged Kenya over the threshold and past the swing of the door.
    â€œNow,” Davis said, which seemed completely out of context, until the vampire who’d opened the door slammed it